School Daze

School Daze

I’ve had the opportunity to be in a top private school and a top public school in the past few months. Here’s what I’ve found:

• Huge attention paid to rest room labels and inclusion. My favorite was “gender neutral faculty” on one. There’s more attention paid to this than there is to homework assignments.

• Political correctness in metric tons. You can’t get a drink from a water fountain without seeing signs about where to deposit bottles, the filtering system, how to drink the water, and so on.

• Signs about bullying, and what to do about it. It seems to me what they might really be conveying is the ease of calling anyone a bully who disagrees with you or tries to correct you. When you’re constantly warned about something happening to you, you tend to think it’s happening at some point.

• A severe lack of competition (and, of course, many schools have done away with “top ten” academic leaders and valedictorians). Everyone wins. Everyone is terrific. This isn’t preparation for upper grades, college, and certainly not life after school.

• Teachers who look thoroughly unprofessional for that calling. Jeans, open shirts, casual clothes, and casual approaches.

• Teachers who can’t speak well. They don’t address groups with any volume or inflection, and they don’t seem to realize it or care. Maybe no one wants to be accused of bullying them by giving them any kind of honest feedback.

• Very little discipline. Students wander all over, drink soda in class, talk when they feel like it. I imagine this is part of “freedom” of learning or something, or some great attempt at social equalizing. I find it to be more like chaos.

• The public school had an institutional ethos. It needs repair and repainting (in an affluent community). There’s not much attention to maintenance. Weeds are growing out of steps and under benches.

•There are motivational signs everywhere, in the classrooms and in the halls. I guess this is development intended to compensate for little discipline and little competition.

• To make up for lost days due to snowstorms, a school year well into June in non-air conditioned buildings where teachers, administrators, and students are just going through the motions in order to comply with bureaucratic state laws on mandatory school days. What a waste of time and money.

I will tell you this: If I had attended a school like these in my youth, I would have probably had a much better time for a while.

And I’d never, in a million years, be where I am today. I had to deal with bullies, I had to keep my mouth shut in class, I learned to read, write, and address groups, and the teachers were role models whom my parents always defended.

But, then again, the only awards I received were for when I actually won something, not for just showing up.